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Written by Adam Justice | Friday, March 7, 2008 |
When J.J. Abrams’s name appears on a movie, it gets your attention. When it appears on a movie poster alongside a headless Statue Of Liberty, you bolt up in your seat.
Abrams is just the producer on Cloverfield, but he might as well be the star attraction. Famed for making a great movie out of Mission Impossible 3 and for the world-wide hit TV show Lost, it was inevitable that this movie would be marketed around him and as has been with hype for Lost - viral marketing was heavily used with websites devoted to the search for answers to the big question about the movie - what’s it all about?
Cloverfield was nameless in the eyes of the world for quite sometime, two short trailers were released in which fans around the world dissected every last second for clues to what the movie was about. A flying head from the Statue Of Liberty bounced down a New York street, people shouting “it’s alive” and a mysterious cab which numberplate had its own website and blurry photos had people talking. Suggestions were made about the devil rises from hell, that it was an alien invasion or perhaps even the latest incarnation of Godzilla. None of these were true.
Cloverfield is a monster movie and it’s a fine one. Monster movies come with stigma attached to them these days. Godzilla was admonished for being terribly cheesy, where it wasn’t actually that bad. After the first Jurassic Park, neither of them got a sniff of help from the critics. It was a brave and ambitious decision to create Cloverfield. One which seems to have paid off handsomely.
Michael Stahl David plays Rob Hawkins, who has seemingly got a big promotion which requires his relocation to Japan. His friends are throwing him a party to celebrate this fact when all hell breaks loose. Interlaced with the party is the attempted character building, it seems that Rob had romantic ties with Beth McIntyre (Odette Yustman), a tryst which is developed through ‘flashbacks’ on the camera film. Rob brushes her off at his leaving party, a decision which will effect the direction of the movie.
The character building is pretty irrelevant in all honesty as the star of the movie is the filming technique. Filmed in a ‘Blair Witch‘ style real-time video camera perspective, it’s incredible that the guy with the camera - Hudson Platt (T.J. Miller), has the ability to hold onto said camera while buildings fall, things explode and people die. ‘People are going to want to know how things went down’, he advises while being asked the exact same question. If you can suspend belief, then it really does look impressive and some scenes are jaw droppingly amazing. One such scene on a bridge does feel like a first for cinema - a rarity in this day and age.
By the end of the movie, your eyes will have watered at the seemingly never-ending action but as is the case with most of Abrams’ work - don’t expect all the answers by the time the credits roll. For escapism and shock-factor, I don’t think Cloverfield will be surpassed all year.
Next up for Abrams is the ‘reimagining’ of Star Trek starring Heroes’ Zachary Quinto as Spock,Chris Pine as Kirk and Simon Pegg gloriously cast as Scotty. If Star Trek can reach half the level of Cloverfield’s intensity, then Trekkies can be assured that their baby is in the right hands.
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